"EVE Online's complicated inter-corporate politics are often held together by fragile diplomatic treaties and economic agreements. So fragile, in fact, that a single misclick can lead to a fracas that quickly snowballs into all-out warfare. That's what happened to two of the spacefaring sandbox MMO's largest player alliances in the Battle of Asakai, a massive fleet vs. fleet onslaught involving 3,000 players piloting ships ranging from small interceptors to gargantuan capital ships. Straight from the wreckage-strewn outcome of the battle, we're breaking down the basics of what happened for everyone to truly fathom one of the biggest engagements in the game's history." The costs of this battle in in-game currency is, so far, 700 billion. While MMO's don't float my boat, I have to say that this is still pretty awesome. Penny Arcade looks at the technical details server-side, and what a battle like this does to the game's backend infrastructure.

I disagree. I dearly love Python since it's the first language that I ever felt truly competent with. But experience has taught me that approaching concurrency using multiple threads and shared state - even microthreads a la Stackless Python - is a very messy business. Actor models, in my opinion, are far cleaner conceptually and scale much better. Hence my preference for Scala over Python in this instance.

Well I can't really argue with that... I was mostly just commenting on the language itself, although to be fair Scala isn't half bad.

I would tend to think this kind of thing would be ideal for something like Erlang, but that would be begging the question since its even uglier than Java

I'm looking forward to someone try doing a mmog in Go. I think it might be interesting to see some of its features leveraged for that type of work - it seems like a good fit to me.